Live podcast with Jamie Dimon, CEO JPMorgan Chase: Corporate culture, risk and the global economy

Hi everyone, I'm Nicolai Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund. Today I'm in really good company because I'm here with the one and only Jamie Dimon. He runs the largest bank in the world, twenty years at the helm, and his annual shareholder letters are mandatory reading for everybody in the financial sector. We recorded this live on stage at our investment conference in Oslo. We are proud investors in J P Morgan, Jamie, welcome to In Good Company.

J P Morgan's origins trace back to 1799, to a company founded to supply water to a growing New York City. It quickly evolved into a bank and shaped its lasting legacy. Over the next two centuries, it grew alongside the economy, financing railroads, supporting industry, and expanding with global trade, but its role became most visible in moments of crisis. In nineteen o seven, as panic spread through the financial system, J P Morgan helped organize a response, stabilizing markets at a critical moment and exposing the need for a central bank.

Through the Great Depression, it endured one of the most severe economic downturns in modern history. In 2,000, the merger of J P Morgan and Chase Manhattan created a new kind of institution, and in 2008, it stepped into the center of the crisis, acquiring Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual. Built on generations of decisions and culture, today, J P Morgan Chase stands among the largest and most influential financial institutions in the world. Welcome, You start

you're there. Well, warm welcome, warm welcome. When we look at these pictures showing the history, the first question has to be what? What is the culture that has made you able to be so successful now, after 200 years?

well, first of all, welcome everybody, thrilled to be here. He is persistent, by the way, because when he asked me about coming in 2025, I said I can't. He said, What about this date in 2026? So here, so here I am, but I am thrilled to be here. It's wonderful. Um, you know, cultures are my whole life. I was always cautious about when you talk about culture, because you can say all words, a lot of people say employees, customers, and they don't mean it.

So the real way you develop a culture is you're just driving it with grit and courage. Like every meeting, everything you do, every trip you make, every person you hire, every person you fire, uh, uh, that that you. It really is about doing the right thing for the customer. Eventually, obviously, do they got to take care of your employee? A lot of cultures on Wall Street, as you know, it was about money, how much money can someone make?

And you know, some of the some of the things in Wall Street are built on their compensation schemes, they're not serve a client scheme. And so, uh, so I've just been relentless, you know, I. When we first did the J P Morgan Bank one merger in 2004, I had a book, how we do business, and Bill Harrison, who was the chairman of the time, said, you've got to send it out. I was like, No, let's do it first, let the people experience the detail, the diligence, the fortress balance sheet, all these things, the follow-up, the open meetings that you have to speak up.

It's not even a choice, hopefully. So, and if you do that, you just drive a certain type of culture.

You say you have to fight it every day. What? What are the kind of things you do in meetings?

so you gotta get out. So they do in the meeting or in a bus trip or in a road trip that you're talking to your people. Everyone knows that you're only trying to do the right thing for the company. So no one in the company is saying they're going to insult me, as long as they say because I think it's in the best interest of the company, the client. Uh, that I, I didn't bring my list, uh, but that when you take a a trip, I come back with a long list of stuff.

Matter of fact, my management committee doesn't like when I come back from a trip, because they know I'm about to lay on them. Why do we do this? and why do we do that? why do we do this? Uh, and th. This is across technology and just about everything else you do. But even in that room, you know, I tell people on my management team, the agenda is your agenda. Don't say to me, you didn't put it on the agenda.

You have to say that is everything important on this list. And actually puts the burden on the other people to say, well, you skipped this, or what about, you know, that issue or something? So, uh, every business has a follow-up list, every business when you travel around the world, you know, knows each other, uh, uh, and it's hard work, you know, I mean it, it's it's harder than I thought, uh, but looking back, you actually do build a common culture.

Why? Why is it so hard?

Because you, you have to be relentless. I mean, you know, if you, you know, when I go around, I mean, I don't let, I try not to let even one little thing skip my attention. So if there's a, you know, if if I read a customer complaint and someone says to me, Why are you paying attention? That's so minor. I say, Well, I'm paying attention to that, because we might be doing the exact same thing to a million people.

It's not that minor, you know? Or, or, uh, you know, uh, it was a teller who told us something that shortened how long it takes to open an account. I've been in buses with management teams and they don't want to hear from the teller or the branch manager. You know what's going on in the branch, because they find it insulting, whereas I look at them, I'm realize they probably shouldn't have that job.

What's the thing you still have on your sheets which you haven't managed to solve?

I have a a list of calls I need to make, a list of people who owe me something, that's the most important one. Uh, a, a, and that one is really

Oh yeah, I for sure owe you one now after this.

no, no, not only like that. Like, I've asked a question, I'm waiting for a follow-up. Yeah, I want to know why this happened, or why that happened. Do do we fix this customer complaint? Uh, uh, and it could be on anything. Then I have a list of things I need to think about, uh, uh, I have a list of things which are going to go on another list. But I ju, I just jotted it down because, um, uh, so it's follow-up dates, calls, uh, immediate issues.

And I probably burn through that list, you know, once every two or three days, Yeah, and it's and then then you done, there's a much and it is you longer list. done now for It'd be, uh,

one week.

my Kyle, I car carry a little folder which has one by each business, much more detailed, like, very detailed.

You say in your by the way, uh, you write a fantastic letter every year, uh, and the letter which recently came out. You talk about, you know, bureaucracy and the way you have to, uh, you have to fight it. How do you? How do you stop bureaucracy from creeping into the organization? Because you are now is a huge organization, right?

The Bure. I really believe this bureaucracy, complacency and arrogance will take down a company. Bureaucracy is like the petri dish of politics and everything else. And there are and by you could be a small company, have it, you could be a big company, have it, you can have it in your branch, you cannot have it in another branch. And it's always the the manager, stupid, I mean, almost always, uh, the way you fight it is w with me.

All the information is shared beforehand, so you know, there's no secret. I remember going to companies and you know, this wouldn't share with that part of the company. If it isn't shared properly, I can't. I generally just cancel the meeting. That, you know, if someone comes in and says, you know, Nicolai wants X, and I don't believe that's right. I say, well, why did you wait for this meeting to do that? Go talk to him. Uh, um, every everything, no matter how small, get on the road, go go see clients.

Clients are a gift because, you know, look, they're, they're demanding, they should be, but they also tell you, you know, in our case, what our competitors are doing better. Why we didn't get something, what you know, if we don't do this in that country, you're not going to give us a big piece of business because how important that is for you. And I uniquely know it might cost $30 million to build a payment system, took up to a country.

But, you know, it's easy to say, well, we're gonna do it now. I just found out why, you know, the staff isn't doing it. And so, uh, th. When you have a meeting, people often don't know who's running it, that's a mistake. Uh, when you have a meeting and someone ends the meeting by saying that was a great meeting, we'll pick it up again next week, it's usually a bad meeting. The meeting should end with, Okay, David, you're gonna do x, talk to these people, not hierarchical, it's just you could, you know, who cut across the company, you talked to HR, you know, consumers got the most people.

This change in their program is going to affect, you know, their branches. Talk about, come back, make a recommendation. I always ask the if you're king for a day, what are you going to do? Because people walk in and they admire a problem. If you ask them what they're going to do, they say, Well, I'd look at this, I'd, I said, No, no, what would you do? And and honestly, for a lot of people, it's just almost crippling, uh, to to try to answer that question.

And so have the right people in the room. Very often, people are making decisions, like people think you go back to your office and you think, no, usually you iterate over and over and over, and it gets you to the right place. Why should If you don't,

teams be?

if you don't have the right people in the room, it will not happen.

Talking about the right people in the room? You said teams should be small, Yeah, very like Navy seals, right?

little, very little politics, meaning also we don't do a lot of super presentations, we just run into how great you are. Like, I think you should celebrate all the time, but when you're in a management meeting with me, is what does the other guy do better? Stripe kicked our butt, PayPal kicked our butt. Okay, I can go one after another, so no matter how good we think we are, I point out who's doing better. And you know, we're the number one FX trade in the world, but we're number seven in Vietnam.

Why is that? And so you really, dr drill down and you find out what you're not doing well, what people aren't collaborating on, uh, and then you have to get rid of the jerks, you know, and and and if you don't, no one believes you, and that takes

Who are the jerks?

some time.

What? What makes a jerk?

It's all about them, they admire a problem. I say they're like good bureaucrats, too. They're great at process, but they like the process, not the outcome. Whereas I like the outcome, I like, like, and also I look at the inputs, you know, like, when you talk about business, you talk about your, the output, your output is your performance, your branch, something like that. But what was the input? Did you train the person properly? Did you build the right technology?

Why didn't you put a branch? Why do we put more bankers in Oslo? Why don't we put more? The input will drive the business for for twenty years, the output is just the result of what you did all that time. And so, um, uh, but the sharing part eliminates a lot of it, uh, not allowing rope, a dope meetings, um, and you know, and like I said, they're good bureaucrats, but some people, it's always about them.

They they, they simply can't get beyond the fact that they want. They're always talking about, like the next job, the next thing, and, you know, pounding their chests. Uh, obviously, men do that more than women, uh, but you, you see these disease behaviors and so, and uh, and I have to earn my trust and respect every day, too. It isn't like I walk in a room and somehow you have to trust me, you don't. You know, you're gonna be watching closely.

What does the boss do? What does he say? Does he really mean it? Does he follow up? And hopefully, I'm trusted by people that, and they know just it's okay to say anything to me, it doesn't bother me whatsoever. I and I, I say that to regulars, the prime ministers, the bankers, tech people, I just try and do a better job, that's it. Um, my board, and this is important for governance, my board. I've been doing this since I got the bank on in 2020.

Meets without me every single meeting. I asked them to do it because, you know, I'm full forceful, I have my opinions, but every time there's a big decision, I have the other senior executives come and say, tell me what you think, tell I want you, and and they say what they think, and so my. They might disagree with me. The people decision or or, uh, some might risk decision or something like that. But after that, I leave the room and the board meets 100% without me.

Uh, and usually the lead director usually gives me a call afterwards, or David Novak, when he was lead director, he would give me a a handwritten note. You know, like he'd say a little coaching, what I could do different, what I want to hear about, what they're concerned about, uh, and it made me do a better job. I was never worried about it. They're allowed to talk to any and all senior management, no, and no one.

I have never done a presentation of the board, at least not since J P Morgan that I can remember. I asked, Uh, And they, in other words, they do it all, and I let them do it. I make comment afterwards, but I don't, I don't do preambles. I don't say that, you know, this person is going to talk about A, B, C, D, and E, then say why are you talking about A, B, C, D and E?

I say, go ahead, shoot, you know, and keep it fast. A lot of the presentations are verbal, so if you went in there, you'd hear the person say, Hey, in investment banking, we did great in fixed income. Let me tell you about how we're going to expand, uh, bankers in these eight cities with these various things. We think over time they'll deploy so much capital and so much. This here's the risk associated with it. We looked at other options A and B, but we picked this one C.

So it's just a verbal, and the board loves it, by the way.

I asked the CEO of one of the other big American banks, what made J P Morgan really special? And he said, Well, it's about it's about the firm, it's not about the individual people. How do you install that?

I think that, you know, you know what it is, and as I look at it, look at it. We all know sports teams, and when you see a sport team, you know, jiving or you guys look at football or American football or your football or basketball, any sport team. You know when the team's working, they're doing the job, they learn their plays, they all want to win, they pass off, and you know when there's someone on that team who is just ruining for everybody.

And it it business is the same thing, except you can bullshit about it. L Literally, you got we did a great job with the best person. The reason we didn't do as well as Goldman did is because of A, B, and C. I always say, Yeah, that's because they're better generally, and but you know it when you see it, and you know that person is ruining it, that's the team. And you know, I'm, I just wear the jersey.

I'm like the I'm not even the senior coach, I'm like the general manager. You know, we have people running the businesses who are actually like they're the quarterbacks, they're making the decisions, and uh, but if you look at the team, they communicate all the time. I wrote in my letter about J. P. Morgan. It's like a neural network, so live over here, she can call anyone, she knows people all around the world to help our clients, and they'll get an immediate answer.

And, you know, it could be different balance sheet, different currency, different problem, a local uh revolver, uh, uh, a great idea for an M and A that, you know, someone wasn't thinking about. And that neural network, you can't replace it, by the way. A AI won't be able to replace it, at least not for a long time.

You say the teams need to operate a bit like Navy seals. What do you mean by that?

I think so, I think you have to have the best of both. You gotta have small teams that are fully authorized, dedicated to accomplish something. So I remember trying to do digital accounting years ago, and the first reaction you get is tech says, Okay, you know, AI, this person says, Okay, sales says, okay, marketing says, okay, branch system says, okay. It's 1% of each person's job, it will not get done. You need a dedicated people authorized to build an account, a digital opening, and that is the team.

They obviously have to rely on lots of people, but they have what they need on the team. That might be a lawyer in some places, it might be compliance, it might be somebody that it's hard to do. You also need the platform. You know, you can't, we can't all have our own separate, uh, editions of applications and stuff like that. So you kind of need the best of both, kind of like these Navy seal teams, they'll have common equipment, common languages, common intelligence kind.

They don't pick their own guns and their own tanks, that's common, you know, and so you gotta, you gotta have the best of both worlds. But you gotta make sure that the common one doesn't create an enormous bureaucracy that kills the ability of the team. And that does happen. Everyone wants to review it, everyone wants to go through it, uh, and so you have to have like little war rooms. Okay, we're gonna pick, we're gonna pick.

What are we? Are we gonna do this with Databricks or Snowflake? Are we gonna do this? Get the people in the room and work it out. Don't allow it to go back and forth with groups for six months or nine months or a year. Not on built. He this guy did some unbelievable, by the way, in in, uh, India, he built that system that identifies, and I remember 700 million people, it's probably more than that, by, I think, by eye, by finger.

Uh, so the transfer payments and bank accounts for 700 million people now, what? 1.4 billion, he did it out of the goodness of his heart, literally built this unbelievable system of ID. And now you can go in India and pay people QR codes and stuff like that. And then the corruption on real transfer payments, I don't know if it went to zero, but it used to be kind of cash that got handed from the from the s the uh s state to state, to state, to state, to this thing, to that, then distributed to the poor person over here.

So I got, I got, those how much didn't get passed on, so

And just to fill in the people on uh, who are listening in, this is uh, n nandani legani, uh, from Infosys, who has, who has done this. How do you? Uh, you have a very deep bench, or you are known for your very deep bench. How do you? How do you prepare people for the next role?

that's, uh, that's that. When you get higher up in the organization, it gets harder because you only have so many choices. And that is a issue about, you know, you can't move everyone at the same time. Lower down, it's easier. We move people around all the time. We've had people go from, you know, banking to CFO, from, uh, you know, from this to tech. The woman running AI ran prime services for us for years. She's a great businesswoman, but she wants to tackle AI.

Uh, so we, we do move people around, and that that is important. Also, my management team meets every week, uh, uh, around a table, open conversation, everyone hears everything, they know almost everything about what's going on. So even though it's not in their business, they're going to hear us talking about consumer payment systems, uh, wealth management products, mistakes, errors, litigation problems, regulation problems, tech problems, uh, customer complaints. Um, and that same group meets once a month with a detailed agenda with pre-reads, and then we meet by business.

And the only other one that meets all the time is a is a risk meeting, which meets, uh, every week, and so, um, mostly around market risk.

Great, well, let's move from, um, let's move from, uh, corporate culture to risk culture. And so when we change topic, you can press that one. It's not the nuclear button, it's barbara. Okay, I've been looking forward to that. Um, what are you seeing in the credit market just now?

Yeah, you know, when it comes to risk, you have to be really disciplined and uh, and examine it over and over and over with risk reports shared. Because people, things change, and before you know it, you're in trouble. So the United States is doing fine. So when I, you talk about private credit now, so private credit, just to put it in context, it's at 1.7 trillion of leveraged loans, high yield bonds are 1.7 trillion, bank syndicated leverage lending is 1.7 trillion.

Investment grade is 13 trillion, mortgages, which is mostly high investment grade or more, is 13 trillion, and there's a bunch of other stuff. So you can see right from the beginning, it's not huge, it's not systemic. Even if a lot of it goes bad, it's not going to cause a problem, and some of it's longer term funded. However, here's what I say, and I wrote about this. I'm not saying it's terrible, but there's been an uh, uh, slightly deterioration underwrites standards across a wide spectrum of stuff.

So it's only been a little bit, but it's the wide spectrum, a little bit assumptions too aggressive, uh, leverage a little bit higher, uh, uh, there's too much ratings arbitrage, uh, covenants have gone a little bit weaker, there's more pick in there. And the thing about credit or any investors that, you know, I think there are more than a thousand private credit people. You may be, you know, Carlisle and Blackstone and KKR and all these areas, and B, who, maybe brilliant, but I guarantee you not all thousand of them are.

So, my view, because that in the underwrites stands, we haven't had a credit recession in so long. So when we have one, it will be worse than people think, it won't be terrible, it'll just be worse. Because in private credit, that may be true for some banks too, by the way. so, so Uh, this is what so saying, I'm saying is not just private credit.

so, is this a saying that amateurs don't know what to do, professionals know what not to do?

Yeah, well, that's true.

How do you install that in your people? Yeah, the to extend the right type of credit.

People have short memories. I, I've had people say things to me literally in the last month or two. I'm like, really, I mean, seriously, like things can. So when I, when I got to J P Morgan, the risk that, and like, just a little example, the risk measurement was the market going down 10%, stock market, FX currencies, moving 3%, the G ten, and credit spreads gapping out by 40%. And after a while, I said to him, Uh, 50% down the stock market, uh, uh, 10% currencies, and worst ever in credit, worst day, so high yield bonds at 500%, you know, seven forty percent is 700 basis points, worst ever was 17%.

And of course, people say that'll never happen, it's too much now. Once you do that, and of course, a wide spectrum of stuff, it kind of undresses how much risk people are taking. And people are selling your balance sheet, they're putting puts in your balance sheet, they're, they're, you know, they're gaining profits and results all the time until it blows up. And so our mi, our losses, uh, and then you start building the business, which is flow, give you good prices, good service, great research, ki, great execution, honest, you know, we fix mistakes, and and you know how you build a real, uh, a real good trading business.

So, and then I don't guess what's going to happen to the risk. I, I, I always look and say, okay, we can manage this broad range of outcomes, low rates, higher rates, lower oil prices, 200 dollar oil prices. That can we? We could argue about what we think the probabilities are, but I will not be put in a position where if that happens, we're in deep trouble.

What are the risks you're most concerned about just now?

Oh, cyber, there's two cyber because of methos, which I assume a lot of you guys have read about, but the bad guys can use cyber and they they're gonna get stronger and more powerful in terms of finding vulnerabilities. It's been written about, you really should read it, uh, and then, uh, but and then geopolitics, so I'm not, I'm not worried about the U S, I don't worry about the U S economy, you know, the economy is like the weather, it's going to get better, it's gonna get.

People talk about it all the time. Did you bring your? But it's not the most, the most significant thing for the future of the free world, free and democratic world, is the geopolitics.

And which part of the geopolitics?

I say the wars in Ukraine, Iran, our relationship, that NATO has to stay strong, uh, that we need to work with our trading partners, uh, to keep the Western world together. I think the worst thing we can do is fragment it. Um, and and remember, economic relations are not just tariffs, there are investment rules, there are regulatory rules, there are, you know, there are all these WTO rules, there are, uh, uh, there. Some people just don't allow it.

There's agriculture, and almost every country has its own special rules. Um, but what we should be doing is trying to make sure we keep the Western world together. America has sixty military allies and partners, and more than that economic allies and partners. I think that is important. And, uh, you know, the fragmentation of that would be the reason that a book is written one day, how the West was lost. And so I'm quite conscious that, you know, I'm going to Copenhagen tomorrow.

I hope they don't. I don't know if I should bring more security or something like that. Um, you know, but I'm quite conscious that we should do that to strengthen our economic alliances, strengthen our military alliances. There are legitimate complaints, no problem, we can deal with those, but we should make sure we don't fragment, uh, the world we have, and that which is precisely what Russia and China want, by the way.

You, uh, run your uh, risk scenarios, is it every week? I think you told me last time we met, or was it every

You know, this, this, we do this Fed C car stress once a year, we do hundreds a week,

so hundreds a week? hundreds. And Yeah,

if you said to me,

what's the worst one?

if you, it's, it's usually the great financial crisis, you know, but you know, we, we would, we'd be fine. The great, if, if that scenario happened, and that's the one we never anticipate is, uh, home prices being down 40%. That was just not on the list. And so there's always something new out there, but we've got plenty of capital and liquidity to handle, you know, shocking scenarios.

How worried are you about inflation at this stage?

Well, I'm not worried about it, but on the list of scenarios would be lower interest rates, higher interest rates, and high interest rates with growth is one, higher interest rates with inflation is one. The worst case is stagflation, and I just wouldn't take it off the list. And, you know, I'm just saying, okay, if if you do that, what would it mean for us, what would it mean for our clients? We run all our clients through tests like that, we run our clients through tests like high oil prices, how many people would be under a lot of stress at high interest rates?

You know what happens to all those rollover loans that people have to pay a lot more, uh, interest on, and that would put a lot of stress in the system. You know, we'd survive it, but it would put a lot, we would be fine, but it would put a lot of stress in the system. You know, again, companies are assuming that debt will be rolled over, well, maybe a hundred basis points more, well, why not 500 basis points more?

Who said that that, you know, we've had 3%, we've had over 2% inflation in the United States for five years now. And and I think there are a lot. M my view, and I again, I'm going to put the probabilities are higher than the market thinks. And my view is that there are a lot of inflationary things out there, including the Iran war, the remilitarization of the world, the infrastructure needs of of the world, um, and our deficits.

And I, I just, I mean, I ask all my economists, I know you have a great economists in the room. I don't know how the world running deficits like this isn't inflationary, and you just may not have seen that yet. That die may have been cast, it just hasn't happened yet. And so when I look at scenarios, you know, I'm not, I'm looking for early indicators, but it is possible that inflation ticks up and that will catch a lot of people off guard.

Not if it's fifty basis points, but if it's fifty, seventy five, people sell ten year bond, etcetera.

When things which we know are volatile, when they move up and down, it's not so worrisome, but if something we think should be stable is moving a lot, it's, uh, pretty scary. So, given the the level of government debt, um, around the world and in your country, how worried are you about that?

You know, I, I'm not again, I'm not that worried, we'll be able to deal with it. I just think maturity should say you should deal with it as opposed to let it happen. The way it's going now, it would, there would be some kind of bond crisis, and then we'll have to deal with it, and it will be okay. It's just not the way to do it. But I do, but you mentioned those the level of things that are adding to on the risk column are high, like geopolitics, oil, government deficits, uh, and they may go away, but they may not, and we don't know what confluence of events causes the problem.

So if you look at all economic history, it's different confluence of events, different tectonic plates hitting each other, and they may affect 2026, they may not, but they need to be resolved. And if they're not resolved properly, they will cause real additional problems down the road.

Should we move to Europe? Say it again, Should we move to Europe?

you?

We should move to Europe Oh, we did, yeah, now. Um, twenty five years ago, uh, the GDP of Europe and America was the same. Now, Europe is 70% of the US levels, and you say that Europe never finished its economic union. What do you mean by that?

yeah. We're slow walking into a real problem here. I think the European Union was one of the greatest accomplishments of mankind. Because after millennia of war, not just World War I, World War II, but the Hundred Years' War, the Thirty Years' War, the War of the Roses, the Spanish Wars, these wars, you know, that's a lot of killing. And they decided, want to live in peace through political means? Fabulous, start with the, uh, the call commission, et cetera, it never got finished.

So if you look at the part of the point of the European Union is to have a common market, so that all of the companies in the European Union can compete across all countries, just like you can in the United States. That common market creates a huge competitive advantage for American companies, that competitive advantage helps American companies in America, helps American companies with economies of scale outside of America. And, uh, and also bureaucracy, anti-business taxes, not conducive to growth.

You know, capital formation has been the thing that's driven most productivity in the world, and you have a lot of countries that put in anti-capital, anti-business. So I think we should be taking care of all our citizens. That's not what I'm saying here, I'm saying that policies conducive to growth are really important. Draghi, Mario Draghi, who I have enormous respect for, wrote the Draghi report. He listed them all 300 recommendations, of which they've done seven or eight, okay, and they're needed.

Capital markets union, some common bankruptcy laws to for for your banks to merge, they need to have probably common insurance schemes, you know, which means handing more power to, you know, unelected bureaucrats. But the common mark would be a huge benefit. I think it's in America's interest to help you not slow walk into it. And and now you all know it. This is not an American saying something bad about a European, but it needs to be fixed.

If that number becomes 60% of America, 50% of America, you and your companies will not be able to compete with American and Chinese companies. The Chinese are building juggernauts in almost every industry, and you're going to need scale and scope. And not only is it important for business, it's important for your civilians, all of them, all of them. If this, if they, you know, affording social safety nets, affording national defense, you've got to be a little more competitive.

And so one of the things I wrote about in my letter is, I know this is maybe a a dream, okay, I, I don't know if President Trump's going to read it, which is if they do the Draghi report, I would give them one big, beautiful, free trade bill.

How would that work? How would that work?

Okay, well, we, we have trade agreements with, you know, the EU today and the UK today and other countries, and you know, they're, and they're only. There's some problem that you'll never fix all the agricultural stuff. You should the digital tax thing could be negotiated, that's fair, you know, it's kind of one sided, and the CSDD thing's got to go away because it doesn't work. But other than that, we should have free and open trade, other than keeping what you need for everyone keeps their own national security.

That was the lesson we all learned, you know, you need to do some things, but in this case, that would include friend-sourcing. So you, you know, I met a great company, have here today, uh, Konigsberg, they make the NASAM missiles, friend-sourcing works too. It doesn't all have to be the United States, um, but we do have to rely on each other for that. So So, no, no, I I, so, no, no, you're I, so, so. I think if we did that, Europe would grow, be stronger, which would be good for America.

Europe being weaker is actually bad for our long-term health and the long-term health of the free and democratic world. And that's that's why, and this is more like a twenty or thirty year thing. I'm not talking about the economy here, but I do think it's important that we try to, uh, accomplish that.

so. Now you're in charge of Europe for a day. Where do you start?

That's, you know, that's the great Kissinger quote. If you need to talk to Europe, who do you call? I? I? I think it has to start with MERS, Macron, I mean, Macron won't be there much longer, Starmar, Maloney, uh, and actually they're talking about the coalition of the willing. You're not going to get all twenty eight nations, but if you can get the six big ones to agree to do some of those things, I think the other ones will have to do it.

And it'll be good for their citizens. I'm not trying to impose on them something that's bad. You'll have more growth, you know, you know, more wealth to share, it should be shared, we should help all of our citizens. Uh, you know, usually, you know, anti-capitalist like, that's just good for business, no, it's not just good for business, it's good for creation of everything that feeds the people and houses the people. Uh, and I, and in America, I suggest some ways to get more income to lower paid a lot of ways, considerable ways.

I think it would go a long way to fixing some of the polarization. There has been a divide, there's no question about it, and I think something needs to be fixed. I also mentioned that when business goes to capitals, they should also ask the question, what can you do for your country? Like John F. Kennedy asked, not what can your country do for you? Because a lot of people that go to Washington, it's just about their tax break for sugar or cotton or corn, or and that that doesn't work anymore, you know, in business, uh, you know, Norway, I mean, you have very sophisticated businesses, but you know, businesses back away from the government because government is really hard.

And, you know, it's almost like, don't go there, but I don't think if we become part of, if we're not part of the solution, it won't work.

Moving on? Um, what will AI do to J P Morgan? And the way you work?

No, we are not going to put our heads in the sand, we're going to use AI to do a better job for you. That's what we're going to do. We already we've been doing it for thirteen years. We've got thousands of people deployed in it. We have six or seven or eight use cases around risk, fraud, marketing, hedging, design, location, uh, prospecting, note taking, AML, BSA, KYC, and it's just started, and and it is really powerful stuff.

And so deploy it, you know, my suggestion would be have. So when your management team meets, they should always talk about it. It should be part of every business review you do. What are your projects? how you're doing it? what's your competition doing? Um, uh, it is also used by bad guys, so part of that conversation is how do we protect ourselves from the bad guys? So, you know, we and we spend a lot of money in cyber defense.

That's network segmentation, passcodes, you know, everything you download to J P Morgan goes through multiple, you know, protection to make sure it's not polluted. Uh, uh, it's sometimes just hygiene, you know, you put these rules in place, follow them, don't allow, don't allow me to be in our payment systems. I don't need to do it, I don't use it, and people sometimes give access to the CEO. Well, you should have access, no, because if someone got my passcode, they're in the payment systems.

So you got to be quite careful how you do it. Uh, you got to work with governments, we need, we're going to need government help. We're going to have to work together with the government to get this right. It is not possible to do it just on our own, uh, because, you know, uh, the weak spot, the weak link is the weak link. So that could be the Norway Exchange, it could be the Fedwire, it could be a JPMorgan, it could be a vendor that serves a company, that the vendor, a smaller business, is taken down.

The company's got to close its manufacturing plants. It it could be a loaners who were just very brilliant, can use some of these things now. And think of the Unabomber in the United States, who, you know, hate banks, they hate oil companies, they hate airlines or whatever, and they're gonna, they're gonna cause harm. So you gotta, you got to get involved in the protection side, and then in our own company, and I think government should be thinking this way too.

Redeployment. So how do we? You know, if we, if people are going to lose jobs, we want to say to them, Hey, we love you, we got this job here, here's training, you can move, maybe, you know, income assistance or early retirement, so that you're taking care of your people during this process. Because I don't know this is going to happen, but unlike internet, electricity, steam engine, agricultural equipment, this may happen much faster than the ability of our society to adjust.

In terms of skilled jobs, where people have a job, but it's not stacking a shelf, it's, uh, equal pay, and so we just need to get ready. And I think government should be helping that too, not by doing the training programs, but by telling local schools to do the training programs. By, you know, uh, giving tax breaks if you relocate someone or assist them or something. So they're teaching companies how to handle this. So we need to, you know, we don't want to have so many job losses that you have and create huge social problems.

Talking of which, uh, on the one hand, you've been very vocal that you want everybody to come back back to the office. On the other hand, you say in your letter that you think at some stage we'll work three and a half days. When is that?

we're already doing it here. That's a pretty small I take that back, amount. I take that back. We've gone from working seven days a week to six days a week, it was six days a week, twelve hours a day, now it's five days a week, eight hours a day. All I'm saying is that sometime down the road, with the more productivity and stuff like that, human beings, developed world will probably be working three and a half days a week.

We'll have wonderful lives, GDP per person will be $200,000. We shouldn't, that's probably, that's from productivity, from capital formation, and, uh, I think work in the office is a different issue. That is collaboration, knowing each other, uh, socialization, idea generation. Um, we have people who work at home permanently. I just don't think it works very well for a whole bunch of types of jobs. And if it doesn't work for the client, we're not gonna do it.

We're here for the client. We're not here to satisfy my employees that they don't want to do it. We've had almost no issue, people coming back, almost no one quit. The newspapers wrote about it incessantly. Uh, uh, and a and a few people, friends of mine said, Look, I understand that you don't want to got it. I don't think that's immoral, I don't think it's wrong, but you cannot tell J P Morgan what to do. So you have that job as long as you can, we'll work out a transition, but if you don't want to come back to work, you're gonna have to find a job somewhere else.

You've And

been talking about jobs, you've been president of the bank for a long time. What about being president of a country?

I I think it's it's too late for me for that. You got to run, you know? And, uh, so I always say I, if you anointed me, I'd be happy to do it. But there's no way I could get through primaries and plus I love what I do. Remember, I love what I do. I do a lot to try to help my company and my country and the world. From here, I'd have to give that up for a quixotic thing.

Yeah, now, if we were to, if we were to tie the whole conference back, we've been talking about, uh, what's a winning corporate culture for you? What is a winning corporate culture?

I'll give it to you real quick. The people real detail and facts, analysis, you never give up on it, you segment into small pieces. If you have companies, aggregate stuff, the they're hiding something, okay, and that includes everything, like allocations, you report everything, everything important. MPS, systems, compliance, rules, regulations, not P and L P and Ls. Are they accurate? P and Ls? I, I, I give people a million examples. This is just a little branch. If I open a branch, I have to expense it.

It's not earning money for three years. At the end of three years, it's making a million or $2 million a year. Is that an expense or a profit, or or an investment? If it is software, I'd capitalize it and I would start depreciating. So I tell people, when you, even when you look at numbers, don't believe the number, think about it a little bit. There are good expenses and bad expenses, there are good revenues and bad revenues.

In our business, you take on a lot of bad business, they you will pay for it, they're bad revenues, and so quality, uh, how you do things, then then you want to have, uh, complete openness with management teams, detailed follow-ups, list people that have a little grit, you know, a little bit of courage to speak up, you know, some people don't treat everyone with respect, uh, uh, earn your respect every day. Like, you know, I look at my company, I want everyone to say the company treats me well and gives me opportunity, and I, I like working there, and I trust them.

I. We make a lot of mistakes, so you also trust me, make mistakes that we'll fix them, you know, and I have a list of those things I got to fix, and, uh, and it's hard, you know, it's like, and you got to, it's got to be everywhere, and we, we kind of have that, we kind of kind of a consistent discipline. And I travel around, I see our people, it makes me what we do for companies, countries, communities, companies is extraordinary.

We do it in philanthropy, we do it, uh, we do it in research, we, uh, and it makes me very proud and it motivates me. And, you know, I go to, uh, somewhere, I was down in the states recently with 2,000 people in the room, thanking our top branches. No, not, not even, not even the branch manager, the people working in the branch who got the award. Some were crying, some never been in an airplane, and we spent for hours shaking their hands and giving out awards, spent, uh, uh, two days with them.

And, you know, I tell you, it motivates me tremendously that we're giving opportunity to people and they appreciate it, and they like their jobs, and sometimes they whisper a complaint in my ear, but I check, that's true, I always check. So, uh,

Jim and I, it's been extraordinary, thank you so much.

all right, my friend, thank you very much, thank you, thank you, thank you.